Slack AI has arrived

Editor’s note: We take our commitment to protecting customer data seriously. Learn how we built Slack to be secure and private.

In the modern workplace, there are countless tools and ways to exchange ideas, but it’s not always easy to stay on top of everything. When information is stuck in silos, the costs can be significant: Gartner reports that 47% of digital workers struggle to find the information they need, and 32% of employees have made the wrong decision due to lack of awareness.

Today, we begin rolling out Slack AI, a secure, trustworthy and intuitive AI experience that will put you a step ahead during your workday. We’re starting with a set of initial generative capabilities, including:

• Search answers that deliver personalised, intelligent responses to your questions
• Channel recaps that generate key highlights from accessible channels
• Thread summaries that catch you up on long conversations with one click

These new native features are easy to use and require no training. They prioritise exactly what you need to know, when you need to know it. And they’re built on Slack’s secure, trusted infrastructure so that you remain in full control of your data.

Artificial intelligence is finding its way into everything, but Slack’s sets itself apart by harnessing the power of the history that you build with your colleagues over time on our platform. When Slack launched a decade ago, it was designed to be the hub for all of your projects, data and conversations – the shared knowledge that employees depend on to do their best work. With Slack AI, you can now squeeze even more out of that deep reservoir of proprietary context and find what you need immediately. 

An internal analysis during the pilot found that customers such as SpotOn, Uber and Anthropic could save an average of 97 minutes per user each week using Slack AI to find answers, distil knowledge and spark ideas. Ready to learn more? Here are five ways that our new AI can help you to find your focus and do your most productive work.

Personalised search results at your fingertips

Say hello to the holy grail of enterprise search: instant, tailored answers to your questions – so you don’t have to waste valuable time sifting through results like a digital detective.

With AI-powered search, users get clear, concise, personalised answers with direct citations to relevant Slack messages. If you’re learning about a new project, search answers will help you to quickly understand the project’s goal, the key stakeholders involved and more. The results are delivered to you based on your company’s public communications and your personal conversations.

This means no wild goose chases using roundabout search terms; if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, AI will make smart suggestions. Just ask a question conversationally, like you would to that friendly colleague who knows everything about your organisation.

Search answers are a great way to:

• Learn about a new marketing campaign or project 
• Get up to speed on company policies, such as the deal approval process
• Find internal subject-matter experts to resolve an engineering incident
• Glean insights about past decisions from historical context
• Define unfamiliar acronyms

Get to the point with channel recaps and thread summaries

What if you could conjure up the most important themes in a conversation instead of having to spend hours reviewing every message that you missed?

With channel recaps, you can generate key highlights on any channel with a click and cut straight to what’s most important to you. You’ll get a quick rundown of what’s happening, whether you want to catch up on unread messages, summarise the past seven days or set a custom date range. 

While recaps take the work out of digging through a busy channel, thread summaries give you the gist of a long conversation, again with just a click. Clear sources are cited in each summary, allowing you to dive deeper into any highlight. 

When you combine these powerful features, conversation summaries help you to cut through the noise and amplify what’s most important. For example, when new team members are brought in and out of a sales deal, they’re often joining without much context. With channel recaps, they can easily summarise the account channel and get the context that they need to prepare for a customer meeting more effectively. 

And with thread summaries, our AI can help you to quickly find the right people to respond to an engineering incident, for example, and brief them on the situation instead of having to spend time filling them in on what they’ve missed.

Conversation summaries are powerful tools for:

• Catching up after time away from work
• Getting up to speed on a new project
• Staying informed on customers in sales account channels
• Outlining a root cause analysis from incident response channels
• Extracting themes from design feedback channels 

You control your data  

Trust is our most important value at Slack and Salesforce. Time and again, we hear from our customers that security is their top requirement as they begin to adopt AI tools. That’s why we’re committed to building AI products safely, responsibly and ethically.

Slack does not share customer data with LLM providers and does not use customer data to train large language models (LLMs). Slack AI runs on Slack’s infrastructure and upholds the same security practices and compliance standards that customers expect from Slack itself. Finally, our LLMs are hosted directly within Slack, ensuring that your data remains in-house. 

The same product values that make us a secure communication platform for work also guide our decision-making for Slack AI – all focused on maintaining your trust.

Bring your favourite AI tools into Slack

AI isn’t just natively built into Slack – our customers are already using Slack as the destination for AI-powered work, with more than 13,400 AI custom internal Slack apps built by customers. Our partner ecosystem is integrating AI into Slack apps too, from growing start-ups to scaling enterprises.

Here are some of the AI-powered apps that you can use: 

• PagerDuty: Bring PagerDuty Copilot into Slack to surface insights, suggest remediation paths and streamline your team’s incident response.
• Notion: Instantly view Notion AI summaries when links are shared in Slack, bringing context from docs and wikis into your conversations.
• Perplexity: Subscribe to topics and automatically pipe updates into Slack, where they can be shared in channels to spark team discussions.

This is just the beginning 

We’re bringing AI to our core feature areas of search and summarisation because we know that quickly finding and making sense of large volumes of information is critical to getting even more value out of Slack. But this is just the first chapter, as we continue to innovate and bring more value to our customers over time.

There are so many exciting features on the horizon. Slack AI plans to create digests summarising key highlights from channels that you want to stay informed on but that may not require your immediate attention. By making it easy to stay up to speed on what you would otherwise miss, Slack AI frees up time and focus for your top priorities. Users can customise the digest with the channels that they’d like summarised, and then let Slack AI do the rest.

Slack is also building a native AI integration with Einstein Copilot, a new conversational AI assistant for Salesforce CRM. It will empower your employees to get their work done faster by providing answers to questions directly in Slack that are grounded in trusted customer data.

We envision Slack as the AI-powered conversational interface for work that seamlessly connects and synthesises insights and actions across all of your people, data and apps. We want you to focus on meaningful work while Slack’s AI handles mundane tasks – so that work can be profoundly simpler, more pleasant and more productive.

Start using Slack AI today

Slack AI is available today as a paid add-on for Enterprise subscriptions and available in English. Additional subscriptions and language support will be coming soon.

Please contact us to get access to Slack AI, whether it’s to chat with sales or sign up for the waiting list. We will get in touch as soon as additional subscriptions and language support become available.